Evaluating sources research paper

Is there a bibliography or other documentation? The claim may be true, but it seems unlikely that both government and consumer organizations would let the additive go unchallenged if indeed it were harmful.

Knowing how to evaluate your sources will help you deal with situations where there is either a confusing overabundance or a paucity of sources available on a given topic. Most books and articles display this prominently, but you may have to look harder for the date on a website or web article.

Some writers argue that researchers should be sure that they have "complete" information before making a decision or that information must be complete. Sometimes your instructor will require you to incorporate certain types of Evaluating sources research paper into your research, but for other assignments, you will be looking for sources on your own.

An occasional split infinitive or comma in the wrong place is not unusual, but more than two or three spelling or grammar errors is cause for caution, at least. Use one source, fact, point of view, or interpretation to test another.

Inaccurate, questionable, or out-of-date sources can undermine your ideas and cause the reader to question your authority on your topic.

The Management of a Student Research project. Information pretending to objectivity but possessing a hidden agenda of persuasion or a hidden bias is among the most common kind of information in our culture. There are also millions of pages that can not be retrieved through conventional engine searches.

Sometimes an information source will benefit in some way usually financially, but sometimes politically or even emotionally or psychologically if that source can get you to accept certain information rather than the pure and objective truth.

If you are not able to view this video, you can try the original version on YouTube or contact Learning. Information about how to download the player is available. Are there any potentially complex issues where the author appears to cut corners or paint too broad of a brushstroke?

Whether or not you exhaust your best options on the mainstream search engines, there are also sites you can use to find things buried in the invisible Web. Pay particular attention to the last part of the domain name for example, the edu in the URL www. Why should I believe this source over another?

Searching for Information Online When it comes to doing research, the Internet can be a mixed blessing. Although articles in newspapers and popular magazines can help with introductory research, since they help you to learn the basics of a topic, you will probably want to use scholarly resources for more advanced research.

New information or changing circumstances will affect the accuracy and hence your evaluation of previous information. Relevant and informed sources can help you to support and prove your thesis and persuade your audience, so evaluating and selecting sources carefully is an important part of writing a strong, convincing paper.

What you are doing with corroboration, then, is using information to test information. An examples would be a World Wide Web yellow pages or directory which describes each selected site and provides evaluations of its content.

Why should I trust this source? You must therefore be careful to note when the information you find was created, and then decide whether it is still of value and how much value. While the Internet can be a vast resource on numerous topics, there is still a lot of info that you are likelier to find at a library or university archive.

If, for example, you find a writer reviewing a book he opposes by asserting that "the entire book is completely worthless claptrap," you might suspect there is more than a reasoned disagreement at work. Are the sources listed? How does the writer know this?

Recognize the dynamic, fluid nature of information. Such information is not useless, but the bias must be taken into consideration when interpreting and using the information.

My experience in using scholarly literature has been in two folds, good and also bad.

Here are a few clues:Relevant and informed sources can help you to support and prove your thesis and persuade your audience, so evaluating and selecting sources carefully is an important part of writing a. Does your research call for the use of very current sources (e.g.

medical research) or can you use older sources (e.g. historical research)? If you are evaluating a website or other frequently updated source, does the website list the date it was last updated and is the date current enough for your research?

What sources will have the type of information that I need to answer the research question (journals, books, Internet resources, government documents, people)? Can I access these sources? Given my answers to the above questions, do I have a good quality research question that I actually will be able to answer by doing research?

Evaluating Sources to Answer a Research Question You will want your research paper to be respected and credible. Therefore, after you identify sources relevant to your research, you need to determine whether they can help answer your research question.